Draw a Venn Diagram with two circles on it. On one circle write “articles” and on the other write “comments”. The size of each and how much they overlap tells you everything you need to know about an online publication. If one were to manage to make them completely overlap, so that there’s no difference between the publication and the comments, then imho you’ve reached nirvana.

Sounds horrible right? Maybe not, after all, the most compelling part of The Verge is the forum posts (not coincidentally that is also the only part of the site that I read — when those posts bubble up that is). Maybe he is on to something neat here, but I’d argue we’d only need one such site — any more and it would just be too much noise.

What’s interesting is that sites like Facebook have seemingly already given people such a platform, but that doesn’t seem to be what people are using it for. The notable exception to this: Google+. Even there, though, it seems to be mostly Google employees and Robert “Super Self-Important” Scoble that post the longer items to the service (granted I no longer use the service so I am generalizing from my past experience).